OSnews

Me, almost seven years ago (2010), about the dearth of news about alternative operating systems:OSNews has moved on. As much as it saddens me to see the technology world settling on Macwinilux (don't flatter yourself, those three are pretty much the same), it's a fact I have to deal with. It's my job to fill OSNews with lots of interesting news to discuss, and even though I would love to be able to talk about how new and exciting operating systems are going to take over the desktop world, I have to be realistic too. Geeks (meaning you and I) have made a very clear choice, and it doesn't seem like anything's about to bring back those exciting early days of OSNews.Me, almost four years ago (2013), about why there are no mobile hobbyist operating systems:So, what is the cause? I personally think it has to do with how we perceive our smartphones and tablets. They are much more personal, and I think we are less open to messing with them than we were to messing with our PCs a decade ago. Most of us have only one modern smartphone, and we use it every day, so we can't live with a hobbyist operating system where, say, 3G doesn't work or WiFi disconnects every five seconds due to undocumented stuff in the chip. Android ROMs may sound like an exception, but they really aren't; virtually all of them support your hardware fully.With people unwilling to sacrifice their smartphone to play with alternative systems, it makes sense that fewer people are interested in developing these alternative systems. It is, perhaps, telling that Robert Szeleney, the programmer behind SkyOS, moved to developing mobile games. And that Wim Cools, the developer of TriangleOS, moved towards developing web applications for small businesses. Hard work that puts food on the table, sure, and as people get older priorities shift, but you would expect new people to step up to the plate and take over.So far, this hasn't happened. All we can hope for is that the mobile revolution is still young, and that we should give it some more time for a new, younger generation of gifted programmers to go for that grand slam.I sincerely hope so.I don't know, for some mysterious reason I figured I'd link to these seven and four year old stories.

Apple, maker of the ever-popular iPhone, is being sued on allegations that its FaceTime app contributed to the highway death of a 5-year-old girl named Moriah Modisette. In Denton County, Texas, on Christmas Eve 2014, a man smashed into the Modisette family's Toyota Camry as it stopped in traffic on southbound Interstate 35W. Police say that the driver was using the FaceTime application and never saw the brake lights ahead of him. In addition to the tragedy, father James, mother Bethany, and daughter Isabella all suffered non-fatal injuries during the crash two years ago.The Modisette family now wants Apple to pay damages for the mishap. The family alleges the Cupertino, California-based technology company had a duty to warn motorists against using the app and that it could have used patented technology to prohibit drivers from utilizing the app. I feel for the grieving family, of course, but this is, in no way, Apple's fault. The only person responsible for the horrible death is the driver using Facetime, and possibly - although that's probably quite a stretch - the person he was using FaceTime with, but that's it.

I'm going to use PICO-8, which its creator, Joseph "Zep" White, calls a 'fantasy console', but really it's like an indie-fied emulator of the computers I grew up with, like the BBC B. When you start it, you're presented with a 128 by 128 pixel display glitching into life, this little do-do-do-do! jingle, and a command prompt.Everything you need to make games is right there: a mini Lua code editor, sprite and map editors, and sound and music editors. It's reactive, instant to test to see if things work, and generally delightful. And the stuff people have made in it is extraordinary. Little short-form games: colourful, fun, immediate, varied. Type SPLORE into the command prompt and this little browser for games posted to the PICO-8 forum comes up. Since no game, including its graphics, is bigger than a 65K text file, you're playing them pretty much instantly. It's lovely.This is just the first article in a series.

Software is the umbrella term for computer programs and libraries, the coded logic that makes our machines tick. At the root of all software is the code, the instructions that enable a human to tell a machine what to do. This code is written in one of the hundreds of different programming languages - such as C, Java, or Python - each of which has its own eccentricities and context-dependent advantages.Yet regardless of the programming language being used, the functionality, logic, and efficiency of the language are always paramount - unless, of course, you're talking about

Ending this year, Ron G. Minnich has got Harvey running in RISC-V architecture, booting Harvey on Spike (ISA Simulator) and running rc shell on it. But he never rests and now is working on bringing it to QEMU and to FPGA. It's a big step for Harvey because we fixed some multiarch issues across the source and Ron found some bugs in timer interrupts in the hardware, so we all learned something.What is Harvey OS?Harvey is an effort to provide a modern, distributed, 64 bit operating system. A different environment for researching and finding new lines of work. It can be built with gcc and clang and has an ANSI/POSIX compliant subsystem.Two news items about alternative operating systems in a row?The year's off to a good start.

Hyperion Entertainment is proud to announce the immediate release of AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Update 1 for all supported systems including PowerPC equipped 68K Amiga machines. Building on the existing AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition platform, Update 1 is the culmination of many man-months of work by our dedicated team of AmigaOS developers, translators and beta testers. It delivers a selection of new features and a host of bug fixes.The naming scheme still confuses me.

Marcan42 of Fail0verflow fame was at the CCC33 event this year, to explain how Fail0verflow exploited the PS4 hardware in order to run Linux on the PS4.The presentation goes back to all the pain the hackers had to go through in order to make Linux compatible with the PS4 architecture, which Marcan42 described several times throughout the presentation as "not being a PC" as it lacks lots of the legacy architecture bits required for a computer to constitute what is known today as an IBM compatible PC.Be sure to watch the actual presentation. It's quite informative and detailed.

Marcan42 of Fail0verflow fame was at the CCC33 event this year, to explain how Fail0verflow exploited the PS4 hardware in order to run Linux on the PS4.The presentation goes back to all the pain the hackers had to go through in order to make Linux compatible with the PS4 architecture, which Marcan42 described several times throughout the presentation as "not being a PC" as it lacks lots of the legacy architecture bits required for a computer to constitute what is known today as an IBM compatible PC.Be sure to watch the actual presentation. It's quite informative and detailed.

Last October at the Windows 10 event in New York City, Microsoft officially unveiled the Windows 10 Creators Update, codenamed "Redstone 2". At the event, Microsoft stated that the update will be released in "early 2017" but we didn't know when exactly the update will arrive.Until now, anyway.Per my sources, Microsoft will be releasing the Windows 10 Creators Update this April.The more regular, smaller updates Windows gets now is such a huge step up from the monolithic releases of yore.

The third and most important thing to consider is this is the only device you can buy right now that supports Google Tango. Tango is Google-made software that, combined with specific hardware, offers advanced 3D sensing. If basic augmented reality creates a flat layer of digital information on your smartphone screen - think Pokémon Go, with the game content built on top of your real world - Tango goes beyond that, to the point where it interprets and measures spaces and objects around you and then lets you interact with digital things as though they're really, physically there.Tango sits in that category of technologies like Google Glass and virtual reality in that you can see it takes a lot of research and innovation to build, but that's hard to see a use for in my personal life. It makes much more sense in countless professional environments, but it'll need a lot more work - judging by this review - before it'd be ready for that.

The well-choreographed customs routine is part of a hidden bounty of perks, tax breaks and subsidies in China that supports the world's biggest iPhone factory, according to confidential government records reviewed by The New York Times, as well as more than 100 interviews with factory workers, logistics handlers, truck drivers, tax specialists and current and former Apple executives. The package of sweeteners and incentives, worth billions of dollars, is central to the production of the iPhone, Apple's best-selling and most profitable product.Fascinating look at what the local Chinese governments do to entice Foxconn.

The trouble with being a former typesetter is that every day online is a new adventure in torture. Take the shape of quotation marks. These humble symbols are a dagger in my eye when a straight, or typewriter-style, pair appears in the midst of what is often otherwise typographic beauty. It's a small, infuriating difference: "this" versus âthis.âI'll stop replacing curly quotes with straight quotes on OSNews the day the tech industry gives me back my Dutch quotation marks (âLike soâ, he said) and adds multilingual support to Google Now and Siri and so on (which right now require a full wipe to change languages, making them useless for hundreds of millions of people who live bilingual lives).Yes, I can be petty.

Microsoft knows this, and have announced at WinHEC that they are looking at making the use of Precision Touchpads a requirement for devices part of the Hardware Compatibility Program, for future versions of Windows 10 after the Creators Update. This, in theory, would mean hardware makers would have no choice but to implement Precision Touchpads rather than touchpads from Synaptics or some other 3rd party trackpad maker if they wish to preload Windows 10 on their devices.I get the impression that most Windows laptops have perfectly decent trackpad hardware, but they just really suck at the software aspect of the story. More often than not, trackpads will function like a PS/2 mouse, with little to no regard for them actually being surfaces instead of rolling balls or bouncing lasers. Even when laptop makers include terrible third-party drivers with horrid configuration applications, the end result is still garbage.I've never actually used one of these fabled Precision Trackpads before, so I can't attest to their quality, but from what I hear, they're almost Apple-level in terms of quality.And honestly - even a potato would be better than the average Windows trackpad.

Clearly there was something extraordinary about Word for Windows. Part of its success was due to Microsoft's marketing acumen. But it was also a stunning technical achievement, and its ability to run on ordinary PCs created the first popular vanguard of the new graphics-oriented style of document preparation.Remember, this was a time when a typical personal computer might have an 8 Mhz processor, 1 megabyte of memory, a 20 megabyte hard disk, and a floppy disk drive. How did Word accomplish so much with so little?There's only one way to understand the magic in detail: read the code. With the permission of Microsoft Corporation, the Computer History Museum is pleased to make available, for non-commercial use, the source code of Word for Windows version 1.1a as it was on January 10, 1991.Quite amazing that we're getting access to the source code for pivotal software like this.

PIXEL represents our best guess as to what the majority of users are looking for in a desktop environment: a clean, modern user interface; a curated suite of productivity software and programming tools, both free and proprietary; and the Chromium web browser with useful plugins, including Adobe Flash, preinstalled. And all of this is built on top of Debian, providing instant access to thousands of free applications.Put simply, it's the GNU/Linux we would want to use.The Raspberry Pi's "own" Linux distribution is now also available for Windows and Mac - i.e., a live image you can run on your PC.

This text is a practical guide to writing your own x86 operating system. It is designed to give enough help with the technical details while at the same time not reveal too much with samples and code excerpts. We've tried to collect parts of the vast (and often excellent) expanse of material and tutorials available, on the web and otherwise, and add our own insights into the problems we encountered and struggled with.

Apple removed the "battery time remaining" indicator from the battery status menu in the latest version 10.12.2 of macOS. Apparently it wasn't accurate.Did you know that MacBook batteries have a dedicated chip that keeps track of how much energy goes in and out of the battery during all times? For example, the 13" MacBook Pro from 2015 uses a BQ20Z451 "battery fuel gauge chip" from Texas Instruments.

The FreeDOS 1.2 release is an updated, more modern FreeDOS. You'll see that we changed many of the packages. Some packages were replaced, deprecated by newer and better packages. We also added other packages. And we expanded what we should include in the FreeDOS distribution. Where FreeDOS 1.0 and 1.1 where fairly spartan distributions with only "core" packages and software sets, the FreeDOS 1.2 distribution includes a rich set of additional packages. We even include games.But the biggest change you are likely to notice in FreeDOS 1.2 is the updated installer. Jerome Shidel wrote an entirely new FreeDOS install program, and it looks great! We focused on keeping the new installer simple and easy to use. While many DOS users in 2016 are experienced DOS programmers and DOS power users, we often see many new users to FreeDOS, and I wanted to make the install process pleasant for them. The default mode for the installer is very straightforward, and you only have to answer a few questions to install FreeDOS on your system. There's also an "Advanced" mode where power users can tweak the install and customize the experience.Great Christmas gift.

Every technology embodies the values of the age in which it was created. When the atomic bomb was being developed in the mid-nineteen-forties, the destruction of cities and the deliberate targeting of civilians was just another military tactic. It was championed as a means to victory. The Geneva Conventions later classified those practices as war crimes - and yet nuclear weapons have no other real use. They threaten and endanger noncombatants for the sake of deterrence. Conventional weapons can now be employed to destroy every kind of military target, and twenty-first-century warfare puts an emphasis on precision strikes, cyberweapons, and minimizing civilian casualties. As a technology, nuclear weapons have become obsolete. What worries me most isnât the possibility of a cyberattack, a technical glitch, or a misunderstanding starting a nuclear war sometime next week. My greatest concern is the lack of public awareness about this existential threat, the absence of a vigorous public debate about the nuclear-war plans of Russia and the United States, the silent consent to the roughly fifteen thousand nuclear weapons in the world. These machines have been carefully and ingeniously designed to kill us. Complacency increases the odds that, some day, they will. The âTitanic Effectâ is a term used by software designers to explain how things can quietly go wrong in a complex technological system: the safer you assume the system to be, the more dangerous it is becoming.Donald Trump, the next president of the United States and commander-in-chief of the most powerful nuclear arsenal in the world, said in a tweet this week: "The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes". He also told a TV host "let there be an arms race".In response to these remarks by the next president of the United States and commander-in-chief of the most powerful nuclear arsenal in the world, Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation and supreme commander-in-chief of the other most powerful nuclear arsenal in the world, said "We need to strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces, especially with missile complexes that can reliably penetrate any existing and prospective missile defence systems".Sleep tight, and merry Christmas.

The implosion of Cyanogen, Inc., has reached its zenith. The company is shutting down all services related to CyanogenMod, effectively killing the open source community project, and since Cyanogen, Inc., owns all the trademarks regarding Cyanogen, the community project can't continue operating as-is.As a result, CyanogenMod has forked itself into LineageOS, and plans to continue doing what it does best.Embracing that spirit, we the community of developers, designers, device maintainers and translators have taken the steps necessary to produce a fork of the CM source code and pending patches. This is more than just a 'rebrand'. This fork will return to the grassroots community effort that used to define CM while maintaining the professional quality and reliability you have come to expect more recently.I hate saying "I told you so" but... Who am I kidding - I love saying "I told you so".I told you so.

On Monday, an angry Apple appealed against an August ruling by the European Commission ordering the company to pay Ireland some â¬13 billion in back taxes, plus interest. Disappointingly, the Silicon Valley tech giant failed to address the fundamentals of the case, relying instead on a series of ad hominem attacks and procedural objections. If this is the best the company has to offer, it deserves to lose its case and pay its bills in full.The problem for Apple (and Ireland) is that the company has no leg to stand on - so it has to resort to flat-out lies, like stating laws are being applied retroactively (not true - the treaties and laws applied are much older than this case) or that the case is unprecedented and Apple is being singled out (not true - dozes of companies all across the EU have been punished for the same thing) or that it's just anti-American rhetoric (not true - many of the punished companies are European).What's even worse for Apple - this thing is a PR nightmare, at least here in Europe. In many European countries, we're used to relatively high taxes (compared to other parts of the world), so large corporations, be they American, European or otherwise, paying an effective tax rate of only 0,005 (no joke!), doesn't exactly sit well with European citizens.It's really hard to swallow for people in a EU net contributor country like The Netherlands to see our tax money sent to Ireland in the form of bailouts - Ireland received a â¬64 billion bailout from the EU after the 2008 banking crisis - while Ireland then proceeds to illegally give Apple one of the biggest tax breaks in history. It's a little populist to frame it this way, but here it goes: I pay taxes to my government in the assumption they would go to maintaining services in my own country and all across Europe (I'd like other nations to come to our aid, too, if we were ever in such a position), while in reality, a part of it went to Tim Cook. That irks me.Apple is not going to win this case. The EU's case is strong, detailed, and built on a solid base of legal precedent. And this brings us to Trump's meeting with technology leaders last week. During that meeting, Tim Cook also got some one-on-one-one time with Trump (and Elon Musk), something not all attendees were granted. When asked by Apple employees why Tim Cook attended the meeting, he had this to say (among other things):We have other things that are more business-centric - like tax reform - and something we've long advocated for: a simple system. And weâd like intellectual property reform to try to stop the people suing when they donât do anything as a company.Apple has several hundred billion dollars sitting in foreign, non-US bank accounts. If it were to repatriate that money, Apple would have to pay the United States corporate tax, which amounts to about 39.6%. Apple obviously doesn't want to pay those taxes, so that's why it keeps its massive cash pile in foreign bank accounts.Apple wants a tax holiday. It wants the US government to give Apple a special tax deal wherein it can repatriate those more than 200 billion dollars at a much, much lower tax rate, and with a Republican president, Senate, and House, such a deal seems a lot closer than it was before. However, the Trump administration is, obviously, not going to declare such a tax holiday out of the goodness of their hearts. This is politics, this is business; nothing comes for free.This means Apple will have to give the Trump administration something it wants, and if you look at Trump's campaign, one of the first things that could come to mind is Apple bringing manufacturing back to the US. The problem here is that bringing manufacturing back to the US is a multi-decade undertaking of strengthening, improving, and expanding vocational education, construction of factories, and the development of brand new manufacturing lines (assuming it's even possible at all, which is a big assumption). Tim Cook can't just snap his fingers and magically recreate Foxconn in the US - this will take decades, and far outlive Trump's four-year or even eight-year term, at which point some other president will take credit for it.Trump will want something else - and it's going to be Apple's cooperation in the fields of anti-terrorism and homeland security - big, big issues during Trump's campaign. During the campaign, Trump called for a boycott of Apple because the company refused to assist the FBI in breaking into a terrorist's iPhone. Admirably, Apple and Tim Cook took a very principled stand against it, standing up for encryption and user privacy.And here we have it. I wouldn't be surprised if over the coming years, Apple will be forced to choose between a tax holiday for its 200+ billion dollars stored in foreign bank accounts on the one side, and encryption and user privacy on the other. How do you think shareholders will react when they hear Apple can repatriate more than 200 billion dollars at a very low tax rate... And all they have to do is give in on encryption and user privacy? Do you think shareholders will be able to resist that? Do you think Tim Cook will be able to resist that?The coming years will be a massive test for Apple and Tim Cook. How much is their loudly proclaimed morality - and by extension, that of their customers - worth? Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

GCC 6.3 is a bug-fix release from the GCC 6 branch containing important fixes for regressions and serious bugs in GCC 6.2 with more than 79 bugs fixed since the previous release.

The European Union has ruled that the "general and and indiscriminate" collection of computer data by governments is only permitted when used to fight serious crime. The decision, handed down today by the European Court of Justice, directly challenges the UK's recently-passed surveillance legislation, which includes plans to retain every citizen's mobile and desktop browser history for up to a year.The Court notes that the collection of such data means citizens feel they are under "constant surveillance" and allows governments to draw "very precise conclusions" about their private lives. "Only the objective of fighting serious crime is capable of justifying such interference," said the Court, adding that legislation like the UK's "exceeds the limits of what is strictly necessary and cannot be considered to be justified within a democratic society."While I have my reservations about many of the EU's institutions (I'm actually a proponent of the concept of the EU - just not the current execution), the EU courts have consistently been a stalwart ally in citizen's rights.

Mark Gurman, trustworthy and extremely reliable Apple reporters with uncannily good sources inside Apple, paints a grim picture of the future of the Mac.Interviews with people familiar with Apple's inner workings reveal that the Mac is getting far less attention than it once did. They say the Mac team has lost clout with the famed industrial design group led by Jony Ive and the company's software team. They also describe a lack of clear direction from senior management, departures of key people working on Mac hardware and technical challenges that have delayed the roll-out of new computers.And just in case you're one of the people who ridiculed or attacked me for stating OS X is effectively dead and iOS is Apple's future, this nugget might interest you - emphasis mine.In another sign that the company has prioritized the iPhone, Apple re-organized its software engineering department so there's no longer a dedicated Mac operating system team. There is now just one team, and most of the engineers are iOS first, giving the people working on the iPhone and iPad more power.It's been clear to anyone with an unbiased, open mind towards Apple's past few years that the Mac simply has no or low priority within Apple, and this only further solidifies it.

Tim Cook, in a posting to Apple's internal messaging board:The desktop is very strategic for us. It's unique compared to the notebook because you can pack a lot more performance in a desktop - the largest screens, the most memory and storage, a greater variety of I/O, and fastest performance. So there are many different reasons why desktops are really important, and in some cases critical, to people.The current generation iMac is the best desktop we have ever made and its beautiful Retina 5K display is the best desktop display in the world. Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we're committed to desktops. If there's any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that.When a CEO has to go out and say the company is committed to X, the company is probably not committed to X.

A while back I decided to try to write a Game Boy emulator in Common Lisp based on this series of articles. I made some good progress but eventually got bogged down because I was trying to learn a bunch of complex new things at once.[...]Instead of dragging on, I decided to take a break and try something simpler: a CHIP-8 emulator/interpreter. The CHIP-8 is much simpler than the Game Boy, which made it easier to experiment with the rest of the infrastructure.In this post and a couple of future ones I'll walk through all of my CHIP-8 emulator implementation.

The GNU project has released GNU Hurd 0.9, GNU Mach 1.8, and GNU MIG 1.8. Hurd has been in development for a long time, and is supposed to - eventually - be the official kernel for the GNU operating system, a role currently unofficially filled by the Linux kernel. GNU Mach is a little bit different.GNU Mach is the GNU distribution of the Mach microkernel, upon which a GNU Hurd system is based. The microkernel provides an Inter Process Communication (IPC) mechanism that the Hurd uses to define interfaces for implementing in a distributed multi-server fashion the services a traditional operating system kernel provides.

This is one of those projects that's just all around cool: Anders Granlund is bringing Wolfenstein 3D to the GameBoy Color, and since the GBC is quite hardware-constrained, he needs to employ some extreme measures to accomplish this. One of these measures is to add a co-processor into the game cartridge.

As some may have noticed, my UEFI branch got merged in November, purely by accident too! However, until now, we still haven't been able to boot to the desktop. Whilst still in development, the addition of a simple framebuffer driver and a crucial fix by Henry has enabled Haiku to now boot all the way to the desktop using QEMU.In today's world, an important milestone.

It has often been told how the Bell Labs law department became the first non-research department to use Unix, displacing a newly acquired stand-alone word-processing system that fell short of the department's hopes because it couldn't number the lines on patent applications, as USPTO required. When Joe Ossanna heard of this, he told them about roff and promised to give it line-numbering capability the next day. They tried it and were hooked. Patent secretaries became remote members of the fellowship of the Unix lab. In due time the law department got its own machine.Fascinating bit of Unix history.

FBI director James Comey has signed on to a previously reported CIA assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin directly intervened in the US presidential election in aid of Donald Trump, according to an internal CIA memo obtained by the Associated Press and Washington Post. The report has also been endorsed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, giving it the unanimous support of US intelligence agencies.While the hack focused on the DNC and not the actual voting machines (I think Trump would've won even without the DNC hack), this is exactly the reason why The Netherlands ditched electronic voting machines roughly 15 years ago, and went back to the traditional paper ballot and red pencil. In today's world, any democracy worth its salt should ditch electronic voting.Meanwhile, the Obama administration was aware of the hack before the elections took place, but didn't want to be seen interfering with the election process, because they thought Clinton would win. Yes.

In response to questions from BuzzFeed News, Google, Apple, and Uber clarified their positions on President-elect Donald Trump's comments about a possible Muslim registry. "In relation to the hypothetical of whether we would ever help build a 'muslim registry' - we haven't been asked, of course we wouldn't do this and we are glad - from all that weâve read - that the proposal doesn't seem to be on the table," a spokesperson for Google told BuzzFeed News in an email.BuzzFeed News asked all three companies whether they would help build or provide data for a Muslim registry. An Apple spokesperson said: "We think people should be treated the same no matter how they worship, what they look like, who they love. We haven't been asked and we would oppose such an effort."I'm glad major technology companies are promising not to aid in Trump with this fascist campaign promise. That being said - these very same companies couldn't wait to butter up to Trump during a meeting this week, so I'm not sure how much faith I have in these promises. A repatriation tax cut would probably be enough to make them change their minds.

Yes, after being pushed back from release after release, Fedora 25 finally defaults to using the Wayland graphics stack (assuming you have a supported graphics card). This is perhaps the biggest change to come in the Linux world since the move to systemd. However, unlike that systemd transition, the switch to Wayland was so seamless I had to logout and double check that I was in fact using Wayland.I called Fedora 24, released earlier this year, "the year's best Linux distro" but one that I would have a hard time recommending thanks to some ugly kernel-related bugs. Well, Fedora 25 is here with an updated kernel, the bugs appear to be gone, and I have no reservations about recommending it. Not only is Fedora 25 a great release, the updated GNOME 3.22 running on top of Wayland appears to be slick and very stable.The switch to Wayland has been so long in the making. That being said, I've been using Wayland for several years now - on my Jolla devices.

A thousand years ago, huge pyramids and earthen mounds stood where East St. Louis sprawls today in Southern Illinois. This majestic urban architecture towered over the swampy Mississippi River floodplains, blotting out the region's tiny villages. Beginning in the late 900s, word about the city spread throughout the southeast. Thousands of people visited for feasts and rituals, lured by the promise of a new kind of civilization. Many decided to stay.[...]Centuries later, Cahokia's meteoric rise and fall remain a mystery. It was booming in 1050, and by 1400 its population had disappeared, leaving behind a landscape completely geoengineered by human hands. Looking for clues about its history, archaeologists dig through the thick, wet, stubborn clay that Cahokians once used to construct their mounds. Buried beneath just a few feet of earth are millennia-old building foundations, trash pits, the cryptic remains of public rituals, and in some places, even, graves.To find out what happened to Cahokia, I joined an archaeological dig there in July. It was led by two archaeologists who specialize in Cahokian history, Sarah Baires of Eastern Connecticut State University and Melissa Baltus of University of Toledo. They were assisted by Ph.D. candidate Elizabeth Watts of Indiana University, Bloomington, and a class of tireless undergraduates with the Institute for Field Research. Together, they spent the summer opening three large trenches in what they thought would be a sleepy little residential neighborhood southwest of Monk's Mound.They were wrong.Fascinating. I had no idea native Americans built huge cities like this far north of - roughly - the current border between the US and Mexico.

The SDK Browser provides any Amiga Programmer a quick reference tool into the live AmigaOS4 SDK (Development Tools) installation on your AmigaONE, via a 100% graphical (GUI) based tool.It can help you find the format (prototype) for any AmigaOS4 system call as well as lookup a specific structure reference, method, tag item, what-have-you, quicker than any other tool. Or, you can simply use it as a great way to wander through the AmigaOS4 development documentation (AutoDocs, Includes, etc.) to learn more about how to program for this great machine and its powerful operating system. There is a great deal of (largely untapped) power available with the "standard" OS if you only know where to look.As always, the Amiga community never ceases to amaze me. The first update to this handy tool for AmigaOS developers in ten years.

I figured, for this and future posts I have planned about MSX, that I wanted an MSX font face. I browsed the web a bit for one and found nothing that I liked. So decided to create one.I'm pretty sure I'll be violating someone's copyright here, because I won't be making an MSX-inspired 8-bit looking font. I am going to build THE EXACT FONT that the MSX 1.0 I grew up with had. I just hope the copyright owner will let this pass, given how "valuable" this font is nowadays and that I won't be making a cent from this. If he or she is not OK, though, I'll comply with their request.I used an MSX a lot when I was a kid. Great machine for BASIC.

Apple clearly thinks the 'time remaining' estimates were causing more harm than good for users, so the new battery life status menu will now instead only show a percentage of remaining battery life, like on iOS devices, which should offer an accurate prediction. The change will be introduced for all in today's macOS update.Apple claims that the reports of terrible battery on the new 15" MacBook Pro life are inaccurate, and in response, they removed the "time remaining" indicator.

The higher temperatures are in part due to especially warm air coming from the south during this year's winter, the report says. And that's where things get scary. Shrinking sea ice and glaciers used to be a thing of the summer, but now that trend is carrying over into the winter months, says Jeremy Mathis, director of NOAA's Arctic Research Program. "The pace of change that's happening in the Arctic ... is truly unprecedented," he says.Rapidly shrinking arctic sea ice... In winter.

Google wants to put Android in the next wave of smart devices that'll be vying to fill up your home. It's launching a version of Android today called Android Things that can run on products like connected speakers, security cameras, and routers. The OS is supposed to make it easier for companies to start shipping hardware, since they'll be able to work with the Android dev tools they already know.Android Things is a new name, but the operating system itself isn't strictly new. It's basically an update and a rebranding to Brillo, an Android-based OS for smart devices and Internet of Things products announced a little more than a year and a half ago. Brillo has - publicly, at least - gone close to nowhere. It was more or less a no-show at CES last year, and there's been little mention of it since.Insert some quip about Google and naming here.

Copland was Apple's failed attempt to modernize the classic Mac OS in the mid 1990s. While parts of it would end up in Mac OS 8, the dream of a modern Mac operating system wouldn't be realized until after Apple bought NeXT.Copland is a really interesting (and sad) chapter in the Mac's history. Here are some documents I've collected over the years about it.A digital treasure trove if there ever was one.

Alarmed that decades of crucial climate measurements could vanish under a hostile Trump administration, scientists have begun a feverish attempt to copy reams of government data onto independent servers in hopes of safeguarding it from any political interference.There's a war going on. A war waged by religious extremists (of at least two major world religions), the extreme right, and fossil fuel-funded politicians, against the very foundations of our secular, post-Enlightenment, post-scientific revolution society. You think I'm exaggerating? I wish. Extreme right websites are asking their readers to pick up arms against scientists. That's where we are.Religious extremists, the extreme right, and fossil fuel-funded politicians know all too well that science, secularism, and a clear, non-negotiable separation between church and state are grave threats to their continued existence. We - as a species - have come a long way these past few hundred years, but it feels like today, with the all-out attack on science by these deplorable parts of our society, we are regressing backwards into the dark ages.Science is the only foundation of progress. Any who seek to erode this foundation are the enemy of the Enlightenment - mankind's greatest invention. Pick your side carefully.

Indus OS - a mobile phone operating system built in India - has become the country's second-most popular smartphone platform, surpassing Apple's iOS.That looks interesting.Now, it's not exactly a new operating system built from scratch, but the developers have tweaked the Android platform to meet the unique demands and culture of India.Oh.

"Funky Fantasy IV" is a 100% machine-translated version of Final Fantasy IV for the Japanese Super Famicom. The project is still unfinished, with little bits and pieces of untranslated menu text still strewn about, but all of the main and important text has been run through Google Translate.Looks like my venerable profession is safe.For now.

Google released a keyboard app for the iPhone some months back called Gboard, and everyone was wondering if it would come to Android. Well, now it has as the v6.0 update to Google Keyboard. It's not only a name change, though. There are a few important new features, including a search shortcut and true multi-language support.Finally - finally - Google adds true multi-language support to the official Android keyboard. iOS added this in - I believe - iOS 10. Are the sheltered men of Silicon Valley finally realising vast numbers of people live multilingual lives on a daily basis and that technology is woefully ill-equipped to deal with that fact?We'll know for sure once things like Wear and the Apple Watch no longer require full wipes and resets just to switch input languages.

"Adventuresome" is perhaps a kind way of describing Pebble's year: 2016 started in crisis. The year before, the once-profitable company dropped into the red, and hit the second half 2015 by not meeting its sales goals. Pebble would never be profitable again. In March of 2016, Migicovsky laid off a quarter of his staff of 160, just as the company moved from its cramped, loft-like Palo Alto headquarters into a gleaming, spacious new office tower in downtown Redwood City. In its optimism, the company had rented two floors; now it fit on just one.It turned out that both Pebbleâ-âand, incidentally, Apple - had misjudged the wearables market. The idea of an iPhone on the wrist hasn't caught on. The one killer app for wrist devices, at least so far, seems to be fitness. Active people find it useful to wear something that quantifies your biometrics and tracks your runs. Apple's emphasis on fashion and Pebble's on productivity and third-party innovation were costly detours - the smartwatch market is rooted in health and fitness. "We learned late, and Apple is learning this as well," says Migicovsky. (He acknowledges that notifications are perhaps the other key function smartwatches perform.) "We did not get this in 2014â-âif we had come out then as the smartwatch fitness wearable, maybe it would be a bit different."It seems my doubts about the viability of the smartwatch market are turning out to be on point. Just as I predicted - turns out people really don't want to strap an ugly calculator on their wrists, not even when it has a shiny Apple logo.

Programs written to run on conventional operating systems typically depend on OS abstractions like processes, pipes, signals, sockets, and a shared file system. Compiling programs into JavaScript, asm.js, or WebAssembly with tools like Emscripten or GopherJS isn't enough to successfully run many programs client-side, as browsers present a non-traditional runtime environment that lacks OS functionality. Porting these applications to the web currently requires extensive rewriting or paying to host significant portions of code in the cloud.Browsix is our answer to these challenges.Neat.

Consumer safety remains our highest priority and we've had overwhelming participation in the U.S. Note7 Refund and Exchange Program so far, with more than 93 percent of all recalled Galaxy Note7 devices returned.To further increase participation, a software update will be released starting on December 19th that will prevent U.S. Galaxy Note7 devices from charging and will eliminate their ability to work as mobile devices.One the one hand, it's great these potentially dangerous devices can be rendered inoperable. On the other hand, it's a deeply unsettling - especially in the current US political climate - feeling that devices can just be shut off at a moment's notice.

Basically: not having a headphone jack might not be enough to deter sales of a phone, but it's still really annoying and requires users to spend additional money to reclaim very basic functionality from their devices. And most of that money flows back to the device vendor, effectively increasing the price of the phone. We've taken something simple and universal, and turned it into something complex and proprietary, for no obvious benefits. It's a bad trade-off. It's... user-hostile and stupid. There's just no getting around it.There's no tangible benefit to ditching the universal 3.5mm jack - whether Apple does it, or Samsung does it, or anyone else does it.We're months and months into this discussion now, and to this day, nobody - not Apple, not Samsung, not John Gruber, not any commenters anywhere - has given me a real, valid, tangible reason why removing the 3.5mm jack is a good idea. Lightning audio is stupid because only the iPhone/iPad support it (not even Macs come with Lightning ports), and wireless audio is garbage - something even Apple is only now finding out. Those wireless AirPods Apple unveiled to much fanfare? They have been delayed and delayed, and are actually still unavailable, because Bluetooh audio is complete and utter garbage.It almost feels like removing the 3.5mm jack was a sociological science experiment to determine just how far people were willing to go to defend and rationalise a deeply dumb idea.

Last year I created an account on Twitter to create a targeted feed for my hobby content and tweets for like-minded retro-gaming folk, separate from my personal account. On this hobby account I mainly follow retro-gaming and Commodore fans. When you use Twitter in a very targeted way like this, it actually can be extremely useful and enjoyable. In any event, during this time I began to see a healthy amount of discussion around BBS'es (Bulletin Board Systems) becoming "a thing" again for retro-computing nerds. And, amazingly, a few popular BBSes were being served off of 8-bit machines. "8-Bitters" were connecting to them, having virtually "off the grid" discussions and playing games outside the watchful eye of Google and the rest of the internet. I wanted to connect to them, too.

The architect of this reorganization - known as "Alphabetization" at the ever-sunny Google - was Ruth Porat, the new chief financial officer. Porat, who was born in England but grew up in Palo Alto, led Morgan Stanley's technology banking division during the first dot-com boom, served as an adviser to the Treasury Department during the bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and became Morgan Stanley's CFO in 2010. She joined Google in May 2015 with a mandate to bring discipline and focus to a company so awash in cash that it never needed much of either. She instituted rigorous budgeting and, according to people familiar with Alphabet's operations, forced the Other Bets to begin paying for the shared Google services they used. Projects hatched with ambiguous timelines of 10 or more years in some cases had to show a path to profit in half the time.At most big companies, such financial controls are standard operating procedure, and Alphabet's investors are pleased. Its stock is up 35 percent since Porat joined. But within the Other Bets, Porat's tenure has been controversial, earning her an unflattering nickname: Ruthless Ruth. "She's a hatchet man," says a former senior Alphabet executive. "If Larry isn't excited about something," the executive continues, referring to CEO Page, "Ruth kills it."I love these stories of problems few of us will ever have to deal with.